Best of #econtwitter - Week of May 22, 2022 [1/3]
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of Best of Econtwitter. Thanks to those sharing suggestions, over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
This is part one of three.
Editorial note: This week marks the two-year birthday of the newsletter 🥳. Always happy to see people getting value out of the weekly emails — we passed the 2,000-subscriber mark earlier this year — especially relative to the low marginal cost of production.
A two-question survey / more general opportunity for feedback here! Only you can prevent selection bias, by filling it out :)
Paper summaries
Very excited to finally be able to share my working paper with Emilie Jackson and @dkoust
bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/upl…
TLDR: Self-employment trends in tax data looked like they were picking up on a big rise in gig work that surveys were missing. That's not what was going on.
1/
^“We found it was largely a shift in what people *report* to the IRS, not a shift in what work they *do*”
If you are still in the "phase-in range" after any wages are reported to the IRS by employers, you get a bigger refund from the IRS if you report more SE income.
This is exactly where we see SE reporting rising—among people who get a bigger refund because they reported SE.
7/
Gambling for Development in 30 points.
1. The argument
2. What it means for international development efforts?
3. What it means for research?
4. What is missing?
5. Who may like reading this book and why? 1/n
^Chris Blattman also summarizes here
We have a much revised (& hopefully improved!) version of this paper on preschool quality. Joint with @orazio_at, @RaquelBernal3, @LinaCardonaSosa, Sonya Krutikova, & Marta Rubio-Codina.
A short 🧵
A big update to my paper on investment incentives in approximation mechanisms! (with @akbarpour_, @skominers, Kevin Li, and Paul Milgrom.) We ask: What happens to a truthful mechanism's performance when bidders can invest to change their values? 🧵
"the United Nations sanctions imposed on Iran in 2006... decreased children’s total years of schooling by 0.1 years and the probability of attending college by 4.8 percentage points."
new in WBER by @Safoura_Moeeni
academic.oup.com/wber/article-a… ht @leightjessica
New short descriptive piece at @SociusJournal: "How Many Americans Change Their Racial Identification over Time?" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23…. Using five high quality survey panels, I assess rates of individual level racial identity change in the U.S. Summary thread below:
Public goods
Procrastination project: Auto-generate your political science paper title based on the abstract🤗 huggingface.co/spaces/ey211/P…
^this works for econ too, and works shockingly well
How you frame a paper can make a difference for where it is published or how well cited it will be. But "selling your paper" is hard, esp. for nonnative English speakers like me. My friend and I built Cloquia.com to help researchers write more persuasive papers.*🧵👇🏾
Announcing a new project:
Apollo Academic Surveys. It's like the Chicago IGM poll of economists... but for all academic fields.
If you're an academic who is interested in helping organize surveys, DM me. Financial support will be available in many cases.
Interesting discussions
To anyone scrolling #econtwitter who wants to learn programming, these are my favorite free resources: (🧵) :
A methods fallacy I've seen more than once recently:
IV does not "let you see" how much of the effect of one variable (Z) on an outcome (Y) operates through a particular channel (X)
Instead it ASSUMES that ALL of the effect of Z on Y operates through X and proceeds accordingly
Today I learned the government helps pay for half of the infant formula consumed in the us.
(Related, government pays for about half of the healthcare in the us.)
Easy to not realize just how much of the US economy is (for both better and worse) effectively socialized. https://t.co/YzLDZVOR2D
Fiona Scott Morton @ProfFionasm
